Henryk Gorecki

By Jane Perlez;

Published: February 27, 1994

He's an immediate gusty presence, a broad-shouldered man with closely cropped silvery hair, bundled up against the cold: green turtleneck, tweed jacket, loden overcoat, houndstooth cap. Somehow one imagines the first classical composer to outsell the pop stars and dominate the classical charts as well to emerge from a more urbane setting than Katowice, a sooty city in southern Poland.

Somehow one expects Henryk Gorecki (pronounced go-RET-ski), this voluble man with a thrusting baritone voice and gruff manner, the composer of the soaring, haunting laments of Symphony No. 3, to be less earthy, less elemental.

We're meeting in the mundane coffee shop of a Communist-era hotel in industrial Katowice, the most convenient place for one of classical music's busiest people. He's got a string quartet to finish for a premiere at Carnegie Hall in the new year. He's just come from a stint in London. He squeezed in a lunch with the Polish President, Lech Walesa, and then there's that second part of a choral work the Pope keeps asking about. Not to mention a round of celebrations for his 60th birthday. Unfortunately, the string quartet will be delayed. Who knows when the Pope's wishes will be fulfilled.

"There are 25 interviews, concerts, jubilees and everyone wants me to be present," he says, quietly enjoying the celebrity. "The months have only 30 days, one has 28. There are no miracles."

But in the music arena there is the miracle of Gorecki's "Symphony No. 3, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs." It is not as if the work was written, performed, recorded and then immediately soared to the top of the charts. Gorecki wrote the symphony 17 years ago when Poland was cut off from the West and the composer was a fiery figure, fashionable only among a small circle of modern-music aficionados. At its premier at an avant-garde music festival in France in 1977, the symphony was frostily received by a finicky audience prepared for more of Gorecki's 1960's atonal work. Instead, they heard a piece that his biographer, Adrian Thomas, aptly sums up as possessing a "profound emotional and spiritual quality."

Unflustered by the cool reviews, Gorecki, supremely though not arrogantly confident of his abilities, was at the time the provost of one of Poland's premier music academies, the State Higher School of Music at Katowice. He went on to other things. He was in almost perpetual warfare with the Communist bosses of Katowice -- "little dogs always yapping," he says now -- as he tried to protect his school, staff and students from political interference. Katowice (pronounced kaht-o-VEET-seh) was a place that the Communist Party kept on a short leash and as a senior administrator, but not a member of the party, Gorecki was under constant pressure to toe the correct political line. He quit the post when his term was up in 1979. As a counterpoint to what he had just been through, he founded the local branch of the Catholic Intellectuals Club, an organization that devoted itself to the struggle against the party.

Then, as an extra jab at the apparatchiks, during the Pontiff's first pilgrimage to Poland he conducted "Beatus Vir," a moving choral work for baritone solo, choir and orchestra in the Pope's presence. During the 1980's, he continued to express his opposition to the Communists through his music, writing a piece called "Miserere" to commemorate police violence against Solidarity in 1981 and another major work, "Totus Tuus," for the Pope's third pilgrimage, in 1987.

As Communism in Poland crumbled during 1989, so Gorecki's music spread. By 1990, Symphony No. 3 was being premiered with big orchestras from Brooklyn to Sydney, and several recordings were made. But not until the smooth voice of the soprano Dawn Upshaw, combined with the full sound of the London Sinfonietta under David Zinman on the Elektra Nonesuch label did all the fuss start.

Released in May 1992, the 52-minute recording moved the symphony from a respected piece in the modern repertory to a universally popular work. The recording held the No. 1 spot on Billboard's classical chart for 37 weeks and has sat in the top 25 for 93 weeks. It peaked at No. 6 on the British pop chart. Worldwide sales of the Nonesuch recording were over 600,000 by the end of the year. Orchestras rushed to perform the work as a way of keeping up with their audiences. Naturally, this renown didn't escape the movie makers. The director Peter Weir chose the first movement of the symphony for the climactic scene in his movie "Fearless."

FOR GORECKI, WHO suffers from numerous health problems brought on by the polluted environment of Katowice and underwent six operations before the age of 26, this sudden prominence has been a mixed blessing. It has meant extensive travel, which he seems to have enjoyed, but it has also taken him away from composing. And it has meant a lot of questions, often acerbicly answered, about what the success of Symphony No. 3 means. After all, it's not every day that a nearly two-decade-old work is dusted off the shelves to such phenomenal acclaim.